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Unfortunately, a lot of businesses these days have abandoned the idea of hiring someone and then training him/her. If you don’t have exactly the skills they want right from the start, they won’t even consider you.

Everybody has to learn those skills. As an engineeer, I certainly did.

Remember the guy in The Graduate who muttered “Plastics”? That was a growth industry at the time. Wonder what happened to people who took that advice to heart? So many “growth industries” have been trashed, both by the course of events and by public dislike (of varying rationality) that it’s hard to keep track. It all makes that counselor’s advice sound pretty silly.

I hate to say this, but why would most businesses need to go to the trouble of hiring someone off the street and training them? With unemployment this high, they have ten fully-qualified, experienced (and desperate) candidates for every vacancy..The key is to learn, at least as a sideline, a skill that’s always in demand — such as auto mechanics, HVAC maintenance, locksmithing, etc. Not glamorous, but there’s always someone in need of the service.

I remember when I worked in a retail store and was transferred to the electronics department; nobody bothered to teach me anything about the products, so I had no answers to the customers’ questions. I asked the Moron in Charge (i.e., the manager) about this, and he said the most stupid thing I’ve ever heard anyone say: “Ask the customers.”I sincerely hope that someday the Moron needs emergency surgery, and the doctor has to ask him how to do it.

Hey, corporations have been complaining about undertrained people since the dawn of recorded time. What they really mean is that their 22-year old hirees haven’t been living in the real world for 10 years. How in the world could they be? It’s all garden variety rhetoric.

No university can be or should be expected to teach anyone e.g. the “Company X” way to do things. What they should be doing is teaching students the basics so that said students realize how a typical system, be it financial or maybe chemical, fits and works together. So that maybe when a relatively new hiree is asked to compile an operating budget he knows what information he has to find. As opposed to knowing where and how, in any given company, to find it. I kinda think that those who complain about undertraining are thinking in the latter sense as opposed to the former.

A company always has the responsibility to itself to use what resources it has in the best possible manner. If it chooses not to by short changing training/acclimatization/ whatever you want to call it, it has nobody to blame but itself.

About Candorville

Darrin Bell’s Candorville is an insightful look at family, community and race through the eyes of Lemont Brown, a young black writer. Bell pulls no punches and delves into even the most controversial of issues. The wit and humor of the strip will draw you in.